From Don Moynihan: Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Ezra Klein recently wrote a provocative and thoughtful piece about administrative capacity in the modern American state. The key claim is summarized here:
I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems. When I go looking for ideas on how to build state capacity on the left, I don’t find much. There’s nothing like the depth of research, thought and energy that goes into imagining health and climate and education policy. But those health, climate and education plans depend, crucially, on a state capable of designing and executing policy effectively. This is true at the federal level, and it is even truer, and harder, at the state and local levels.
So this is what I have become certain of: Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed.
At least two parts of this argument seem right to me.
- We don’t pay enough attention to administrative capacity in general. (I study public administration, so I’m always up for more attention to this topic!)
- Progressives are so devoted to policy design that they neglect administration, and then are surprised when their carefully designed policies don’t work.
From there I want to offer a set of stylized facts about American administrative capacity that are different in content, but similar in spirit to the ones that Klein offered. These claims are provisional — I could be wrong — but are plausible and not closely considered in Klein’s account, which does not pretend to be a comprehensive take on the topic. They incorporate some of my favorite research in this area, and some thoughtful responses from when I tweeted a bit about the topic.
This entire essay is good.
One of the things I have been thinking about is Napoleon’s line about how cemeteries are filled with indispensable men.
He wanted plans that could be run by morons. Swap any two morons out and the plan still works.Report
It underpants gnomes policy.
1) Come up with a great idea!
2) ???
3) Solve the problem(s)!
Number 2 is the difficult, unpleasant work no one wants to do, because it’s more fun and attention getting to simply be the bold ideas person.Report
And an eternal litany of how #1 would have worked if.
It would have worked if we had more time.
It would have worked if we had more funding.
It would have worked if the schools were better.
It would have worked if there wasn’t so much opposition in the media.
It would have worked ifReport
Republican and other rightists activists spent decades destroying administrative capacity in the United States. Beyond cutting taxes to decrease funding and issuing anti-administrative judicial opinions, they engaged in a long propaganda campaign against the idea that government could do anything good. Among other things, they treated public administration as a type of job that is only fit for people that can’t make it out in the world of corporations, high finance, and big law.Report
This appears to happen in liberal/progressive enclaves as well, though.
There are a handful of cities where taxes are high, the tax base is rich, and there is social status to be gained in being part of Good Governance.
And it happens there too.Report
I think Moynihan is largely correct when he places the blame on local control, federalism, and veto points. NIMBYism is a perfect example of this. In the United States, building permission and zoning have been done at the local level for decades if not centuries. Various progressive-era reforms created public comment times before the permits are granted generally. This is stronger in some states more than others. This past Sunday, the NY Times had an article on The Twilight of the NIMBYs. The NIMBYs featured were old, very old. The star of the article was 78 years old. In other words, she is an old economy Stevette who purchased her property in 1979 for $112,500.00. In 2022 money, this comes out to $447,999.48. The woman’s house in Marin County is almost certainly worth well north of a million dollars and the median home price in California is $800,000.00. In San Francisco, the median listing is 1.3 million according to realtor.com. As an example, a two-bedroom, two-bath unit in my building was listed at 1.2 million and sold for nearly 1.7 million this year.
The key part of the NIMBY article was this: “Over the course of several interviews, many of the most active homeowners expressed a feeling of upper middle-class regression. It seems unfair to them that people who did exactly what society told them to do — buy a house, get involved in their neighborhood — are now being asked to accept large changes in their surroundings.”
Notice how similar this is to complaints from Millennials about how they did as they were told, took on loans, went to school, and then graduated into a recession, and were chided for not wanting to “flip burgers” or given lectures on avocado toast habits from people who came from money. The difference is that we let old NIMBYs take this complaint and indulge them but scold millennials because old NIMBY have money and the time to go to all the local meetings and stop development.
I am far from an expert but my rough understanding is that many other nations either put development at a national level in order to avoid NIMBYism and/or have a firmly technocratic stance that does not have public comment opportunities.Report
The irony is that all that public comment time and other veto points were established so that marginalized people who would normally be steamrolled by aggressive development would have a chance to be heard.Report
So… should we get rid of those veto points?Report
One of the reasons many other nations can do development at a national level and the US can’t is scale and geographic diversity. People in Colorado are disinclined to let anyone from Mississippi (for example) have a say in how development works in Colorado. I’m sure the reverse is also true.
I paired Mississippi with Colorado intentionally. Mississippi’s population has barely grown since 1990; Colorado’s has exploded over that same period. Mississippi’s water problems are of the “too much” variety; Colorado’s are “too little”. Climate change will likely exacerbate those water differences. Development in Colorado is often constrained by the 36.6% federal land ownership; Mississippi’s federal land ownership is 7.5%. Mississippi is a much poorer state than Colorado. The two are going to have radically different development needs and constraints.Report
Agreed – and our biggest development impediment is a white good ol’ boy network that refuses to cede any power to anyone. Hell, we still haven’t handed out the rent subsidy money we got over a year ago, and we haven’t expanded medicare even though the Republican state auditor has shown it would drive job growth and tax receipts far in excess of state costs.Report
This is exactly why I’m staying close to the Great Lakes.Report
I always point out that the US record high for wet bulb temperature — that’s the one that kills you — wasn’t along the Gulf Coast, but in Wisconsin during the Chicago heat wave in 1995 :^)Report
Fair enough but you can also do it at the state level which would cut down on the NIMBYism.Report
Competent administration takes time and money, both of which are in shot supply in the US when it come to government at any level. It also takes an understanding that governments aims and objectives – to say nothing of its incentives – are not and should not be anything mirroring business. Lean Six Sigma may make companies more profitable (even as it sets them up for supply chain disasters) but its a horrible approach for government.Report
This is true, and right up there with education should not necessarily mirror a business, or criminal justice, or healthcare, etc. There are certainly lessons that can be learned from points of intersection, but to pretend that business can map directly to those areas over the bulk of the institution is a nice bit of fiction we’ve allowed to take root.Report
The Empire State Building might not be the words best example because similarly projects at the time took a decently long amount of time to build. For instance, the bill that authorized the New York City subway was passed in 1894, building didn’t start until 1898 and the system opened in 1904. So basically ten years from legislation to opening. The expansion of the system was about the same pace as current building. Same with the electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad and building of the original Penn Station.Report
I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems.
Right here’s your problem.
More seriously, though, there’s a lot of this stuff on the left left and the right. In fact, there’s a spirited dialogue among liberals broadly (that is, most people in the mainstream of American politics, from libertarians to the center-left) that’s been going on for decades. A fun book that might be up the people here’s alley is The People’s Republic of Walmart, but if you want to go more scholarly, there’s a whole lot of literature on, say, the administrative aspects of the more expansive welfare states of the Nordic countries, say, or on the successes and failures of administration in the former Soviet Union, etc. If you want more center-left stuff, Landis is like the administrative state guru, and wrote a whole bunch on it from the perspective of a New Deal democrat, and as far as I can tell, still widely read among political scientists and public policy folk. You can also find a bunch of books that are basically anti-Landis, from the right and the, er, neoliberal center-left, or the technocratic center-left, etc., etc.
Klein’s problem is that he’s a guy who exists in a particular bubble, in which a particular range of ideas are discussed, with a particular set of aims in mind. Most of those aims involve either a.) getting a particular type of politician elected, or b.) convincing elected (or likely to be elected) politicians to support certain types of policies, or c) writing up those policies in the form of laws or regulations. There’s a whole world of public administration and public policy that’s just outside of Klein’s field of vision, because it doesn’t exist in think tank world, or in beltway movers and shakers world, but the people who go through public policy schools and end up in local, state, or federal government tend to be aware of it, because that’s literally what they study and what they do, and it would not take long to learn that by asking a few people outside of Klein’s bubble.Report
By the way, one of the biggest differences between today’s political pundits, and the political pundits of 40 years ago, on both the left and the right, is how poorly read today’s pundits are. I’m not saying the pundits of 40 years ago were smarter, necessarily, or that their effects on the discourse were all that much better, but they were at least well read. Today? “I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems” is pretty representative of the pundit class.Report
I was listening to Hidden Brain a while back, and this one is (I think) relevant to these kinds of discussions.
What rogue LA crosswalk collectives state about responsive government: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/crosswalk-collective-tyre-extinguishers-los-angeles-united-kingdom-pedestrians.html
Actions like the DIY crosswalks “really show that government isn’t working,” said Chang, who now works for Washington state but has a lot to say about these issues in his own personal capacity: “It isn’t responsive. It shows a gap.” It’s clear, Chang said, that pedestrian safety is incredibly important to communities, but it’s difficult for their concerns to break through many cities’ all-encompassing bias toward cars: “Some measurable action needs to be taken. People cross locations every day, and sometimes small things can have a huge impact on how people feel about using their community streets.”Report